Monday Reads: Trumpist Chaos is on an Exponential Growth Path
Posted: May 11, 2020 Filed under: Afternoon Reads, Black Lives Matter, COVID19, tRump crimes against humanity 15 Comments
Good Day Sky Dancers!
The Chaotic Trumpist Regime continues to wreak havoc on the peace, health, and stability of our Democracy. Looking at headlines today creates the impression that we are under attack from within in so many ways that it’s hard to understand and counter them all. It’s also difficult to prioritize what we should be reading about. Here’s my list and I know there’s more!
Trump has cut funding to Doctors and Scientists working on a Covid 19 vaccine and insisting this pandemic will go away without a vaccine.
https://twitter.com/Politidope/status/1258843464952881152
Meanwhile, back in reality, Sarah Owermohle of Politico writes: “Why the U.S. isn’t prepared to meet overwhelming demand for a coronavirus vaccine. The nation’s supply chain isn’t anywhere close to ready. What I want to know is how could we possibly be preparing for this when Trump thinks we don’t need a vaccine?
The nation is already grappling with a shortage of the specialized glass used to make the vials that will store any vaccine. Producing and distributing hundreds of millions of vaccine doses will also require huge quantities of stoppers — which are made by just a handful of companies — as well as needles and refrigeration units. Low stocks of any one of these components could slow future vaccination efforts, much as shortfalls of key chemicals delayed widespread coronavirus testing.
A massive manufacturing effort is already gearing up to produce hundreds of millions of doses of promising vaccines now in late-stage trials, as scientists and the government gamble that at least one of the shots will prove safe and effective. The effort could rival the urgent national campaign to vaccinate children against polio in the 1950s.
“Probably the biggest challenge will be scaling up the actual vaccine. It’s one thing to have clinical trial samples and materials in lab quantities,” said George Zorich, a pharmacy expert and CEO of ZEDPharma. “It’s another challenge actually scaling that up effectively.”
Potentially making it even harder is that the U.S. is striking out on its own. The administration has snubbed an international collaboration spearheaded by the World Health Organization, while the president readies for a November election that could be a referendum on his coronavirus response.
This is really no way to run a country or a response to a nationwide threat.
The Flynn Travesty has caused a number of former DOJ employees to call for investigation by Congress and for judicial action.
This is probably even scarier than the Pandemic. As I said before. this is truly Banana Republic territory.
You’ll just love the Republican plan for any more monetary help to people hold on to their lives. Hand them your social security and you’ll get diddles for now. So, your choice on when to fall of the financial cliff.
https://twitter.com/AnnieLowrey/status/1259674701116223489
And we still have to deal with angry Trumpist mobs wanting access to strip clubs, nail salons, and gun stores. From Steve Neavling / News & Views of the9 Detroit Metro Times: “Gov. Whitmer becomes target of dozens of threats on private Facebook groups ahead of armed rally in Lansing”
Dozens of angry Michiganders, fueled by conspiracy theories and disinformation about the coronavirus, are promoting violence and mobilizing armed rallies against Gov. Gretchen Whitmer on Facebook, in violation of the social media company’s policies.
Metro Times gained access to four private Facebook groups that can only be seen by approved members. The pages, which have a combined 400,000 members, are filled with paranoid, sexist, and grammar-challenged rants, with members encouraging violence and flouting the governor’s social-distancing orders.
On Sunday, after being contacted by Metro Times, Facebook removed one of the groups, Michigan United for Liberty, and deleted posts on others for violating the company’s policy against inciting violence. Facebook announced last month that it will remove groups and events that encourage people to defy social-distancing measures. Facebook also is investigating the other groups.
“We removed one group for violating our policies and will remove any other violations as we continue our review,“ a Facebook spokesperson tells Metro Times.
Assassinating Whitmer is a common theme among members of the groups. Dozens of people have called for her to be hanged.
“We need a good old fashioned lynch mob to storm the Capitol, drag her tyrannical ass out onto the street and string her up as our forefathers would have,” John Campbell Sr. wrote in a group called “People of Michigan vs. Gov. Gretchen Whitmer,” which had nearly 9,000 members as of Monday morning.
Steve Doxsie had the same idea: “Drag that tyrant governor out to the front lawn. Fit her for a noose.”
“Either President Trump sends in the troops or there is going to be a midnight lynching in Lansing soon,” Michael Smith chimed in.
Others suggested she be shot, beaten, or beheaded.
“Plain and simple she needs to eat lead and send a statement to the rest of the democrats that they are next,” James Greena, of Fennville, wrote.
Chris Rozman said, “She needs her ass beat. Most of these politicians need a good ass whooping. Just. Punch there lights out.”
When someone suggested the guillotine, Thomas Michael Lamphere responded, “Good ol’ fashioned bullets work better, but I like the enthusiasm.”
“Wonder how long till she’s hit with a shotgun blast,” Chris Parrish wrote.
Matthew Woodruff had another idea: “Can we please just take up a collection for an assassin to put that woman from Michigan down,” he asked.
Lynching seems to be the “in” remedy with Trumpists these days. Black Americans are still the primary target and there is no lack of it in the news these days either.
I continue to wonder how we can rid ourselves of all of these Trumpists even if we do rid ourselves of Trump. It is truly discouraging that such a vile minority could overtake our government. The Pandemic Mismanagement chaos is being used by many Republican States to suppress the rights and well being of minority citizens.
The majority of Americans continue to support Public Health measures taken to make every one safe and are appalled by the Open Up Demonstrations. (Via The AP)
A majority of Americans disapprove of protests against restrictions aimed at preventing the spread the coronavirus, according to a new poll that also finds the still-expansive support for such limits — including restaurant closures and stay-at-home orders — has dipped in recent weeks.
The new survey from the University of Chicago Divinity School and The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research finds 55% of Americans disapprove of the protests that have popped up in some states as some Americans begin chafing at public health measures that have decimated the global economy. Thirty-one percent approve of the demonstrations.
How many will continue to all prey to Trumpist Gas Lighting? (Via WAPO an Greg Sargent.) Certainly more folks can see9 he’s really the Psycho in Chief.
The news that the novel coronavirus has invaded President Trump’s inner circle — and that the White House is implementing aggressive testing and tracing to combat it — is a devastating story on an obvious and immediate level, but also on a deeper and longer-lasting one.
Most palpably, it has revealed the sort of glaring double standard that’s catnip to political media: The White House is taking extensive steps to protect Trump and his top advisers with resources that are largely unavailable to the rest of us, in part due to his own dereliction.
But new reporting about the White House’s handling of this points to something more fundamental. How will Trump persuade the country we are returning to a normalcy that makes it safe to resume economic activities when his own advisers are panicked about its invasion of their own spaces, even as they can protect themselves in a way we cannot?
According to CNN, Trump’s advisers grasp that this story has become a deadly problem for them. But note why they have concluded this:
An official said there is extreme sensitivity inside the White House at the current state of affairs with officials recognizing the contradiction in telling states to reopen while the White House enhances protocols to prevent the spread of the coronavirus.The problem isn’t just that this story is revealing that Trump and his advisers benefit from testing and tracing that the rest of us mostly do not enjoy, though that’s damning enough.
It’s also that this shatters the larger illusion Trump is trying to weave with his magical reality-bending powers — that the coronavirus has been so tamed by his stupendous leadership that it’s now safe to reopen the country, setting the stage for an equally spectacular Trump-marshaled comeback.
The most interesting office pool game right now is which of this gang of feckless nitwits is now under quarantine and which ones are still running around coughing on people? This tool is obviously following the example of his master.
It appears Dr Fauci and a few others may be the only ones in the administration following its own guidelines but this also seems pretty convenient.
So, there’s plenty more headlines out there today if your mental health and blood pressure can handle it. Just check out the ones on SCOTUS then light a candle for the health of Notorious BRG
Be safe! Be kind to yourself and others! Stay your ass home as much as possible!
xoxo,
Dakinikat, not afraid to wear a mask and still not afraid to speak out against injustice!
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CsLhNxzwK1Y&list=RDCsLhNxzwK1Y&index=1
Banana Republican Friday Reads
Posted: May 8, 2020 Filed under: COVID19, morning reads, tRump crimes against humanity 38 Comments
Good Day Sky Dancers!
Lessee … High unemployment rate (14.7%)…. check. Unchecked Pandemic clearly botched with high levels of death … check … Cronyism and Nepotism out the wazoo …. check. State News channel aiding and abetting all of it using propaganda … check. Focused hate on scientists and reliance on sham science, lava level hate for journalists, people of varying religions, ethnicities, and race … check … stacked judiciary … check ... Ugly ass thug who doesn’t speak coherently about anything but shouts a lot about people out to get him …check
Am I leaving anything out?
Well, feel free to add to the list. because I’m undoubtedly leaving out how quickly Trumpists, McConnell, and Barr have let our country slide into chaos so they can stack the courts and rewrite the Constitution into something it was never supposed to be. And all those links are fresh today. We continue our path to Banana Republic. No where is this clearer today than in the revival of crazy ass, lying General Flynn. The only thing that comes between him returning to the West Wing after pleading guilty to lying to the FBI about his associations with the Russians and breaking a slew of lobbying laws including being an unregistered foreign agent is one Judge. This is why Mitch McConnell is intent on getting rid of as many prudent, qualified judges on any federal court. Judges have stopped their coup a helluva lot more times than the opposition party.
From Reuters: “Skeptical judge could hold up Trump administration’s bid to clear Flynn, legal experts say”
The notoriously independent-minded federal judge who once said he was disgusted by the conduct of Michael Flynn could block the administration’s bid to drop criminal charges against the former adviser to President Donald Trump, legal experts said.
The Department of Justice on Thursday told U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan in Washington it wants to drop the case against Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser, following a pressure campaign by the Republican president and his political allies.
While judges typically sign off on such motions, Sullivan could refuse and instead demand answers from the DOJ about who requested the sudden about-face, said Seth Waxman, a former federal prosecutor now at the law firm Dickinson Wright.
“If Judge Sullivan wanted to he could conduct an inquiry and start asking a lot of questions,” said Waxman.
Flynn, a retired Army lieutenant general who served as an adviser to Trump during the 2016 election campaign, had been seeking to withdraw his 2017 guilty plea in which he admitted to lying to the FBI about interactions with Russia’s ambassador to the United States in the weeks before Trump took office.
Flynn’s lawyers, both in court and in public, had argued that he was ambushed as part of a plot by biased investigators and that the case should be dismissed. Trump said in March that he was considering a pardon for Flynn.
The Justice Department said in a court filing on Thursday it is no longer persuaded that the FBI’s January 2017 interview with Flynn that led to the charges was conducted with a “legitimate investigative basis” and does not think Flynn’s statements were “material even if untrue.”
While the judge still has to rule on the submission, elated supporters of Flynn said there was no way Sullivan could force the department to prosecute if it did not want to. But the judge could stop Flynn from withdrawing his guilty plea and impose sentence. In that case, Trump could pardon Flynn.
And Trump wants him back in the West Wing! This is from the Daily Beast: “Team Trump Wants Flynn Back for 2020, Sees Him as Its ‘Nelson Mandela’”.
With the Justice Department announcing Thursday that it would drop the case against Michael Flynn, officials close to President Donald Trump are already gaming out ways to bring the former national security adviser back onto the national political stage.
Of the nine senior Trump administration officials, campaign staff, outside advisers, and longtime associates of the president reached on Thursday, all said that they wanted Flynn to assume some public-facing role in service of the president, including potentially as an official Trump surrogate as Election Day inches closer. One even compared the ex-general, who pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his contacts with Russian officials, to one of history’s greatest human rights icons.
“Years ago when Nelson Mandela came to America after years of political persecution he was treated like a rock star by Americans,” John McLaughlin, one of President Trump’s chief pollsters, told The Daily Beast on Thursday evening. “Now after over three years of political persecution General Flynn is our rock star. A big difference is that he was persecuted in America.”
We’re due for another slaughter at the FBI now.
President Trump voiced uncertainty Friday over the future of his FBI director, Christopher A. Wray, a day after the Justice Department moved to throw out the guilty plea of the president’s former national security adviser, Michael T. Flynn.
The president’s comments in a phone interview with Fox News highlight the ongoing distrust between the White House and some senior law enforcement officials in the wake of a nearly two-year investigation by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III into the Russia’s 2016 election interference and the Trump campaign.
“It’s disappointing,” Trump said when asked about Wray’s role in the ongoing reviews of the FBI’s handling of the Russia investigation. “Let’s see what happens with him. Look, the jury’s still out.”
Trump faulted the FBI director for “skirting” the debate surrounding the Russia investigation, although the agency and the Justice Department have insisted it has cooperated fully with officials reviewing the case.
And nothing says Kim Jong Il like dragging out elderly veterans during a pandemic that is likely to kill them if they get it just for a display of jingoism. On full display is his maskless face and Melania’s highly sculpted ass.
None of the secret service or the military guards–including the color guard–are wearing masks. Meanwhile, it looks like we may have another “hotspot”. It’s the damn West Wing which may actually give us all a break from Trumpist insanity.
I’m just hoping we can some how get rid of JarVanka for awhile. This is from WAPO: “I worked for Jared Kushner. Of course he says his covid-19 failure is a success. President Trump’s son-in-law always casts himself as the genius cleaning up someone else’s problems.”
Jared Kushner’s coronavirus response team, we learned this week, is fumbling because it’s largely staffed with inexperienced volunteers. Of course it is. It’s being run by one.
Kushner’s lack of experience and expertise has not been remedied in any way during his now three-plus years in the White House. After bungling many high-profile efforts to address various problems and often making them worse (see, Middle East, peace in), he keeps being handed more responsibilities with higher stakes. He has wasted taxpayer resources and endangered lives trying on policy roles usually reserved for the country’s top experts with the sophistication of a child playing dress-up, cavalierly discarding them when he can’t fit into them.
There have been no consequences. In any normal administration, an adviser with Kushner’s string of failures would be fired, but Kushner, like his father-in-law, keeps crediting himself with imaginary successes. Most recently, he declared the administration’s coronavirus response “a great success story,” a mind-boggling assertion that raises the question of what, if anything, Kushner thinks failure looks like. He has also continued to bash the actual experts, disputing their assessments and implying that they, not he, are the amateurs, and he is here to clean up their mess.
This is basically Kushner’s modus operandi, and it’s painfully familiar to me because he was my boss when I was the editor in chief of the New York Observer, which he had bought when he was 25. (I’ve written before about what he was like as a businessman.) One of the more memorable instances of this I witnessed was at a memorial service for a beloved longtime Observer staffer, Tyler Rush, who’d joined the paper well before Kushner bought it. When it came time for Kushner to say a few words, he launched into a supercilious monologue crediting himself with finally getting the paper published on time after what he described as chaos when he arrived. He also told an anecdote about Rush approaching him when he bought the paper to note that his staff was underpaid, which was true at the time, and true when I took the editor job years later. Kushner congratulated himself during the memorial for giving Rush and his production team the only raise that year because “unlike everyone else,” Rush hadn’t been lying to Kushner.
Let’s see if any of their religionist craziness or white wing nationalist views can protect them now. Having all of them sick would actually be a nice ending for the week and I say that fully knowing that it sounds harsh. But, what a better fate for the crew that has introduced us to living in a banana republic hell realm of their making.
An they can take their little dogs McConnell and Barr with them …
However, for the non Magrats in our country, be safe, be kind and gentle to yourself and others, and stay your asses home!
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2shR99NnwCA
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